At its peak, Ku Klux Klan gripped Dallas

October 23, 1923, was Ku Klux Klan Day at the State Fair of Texas. It was a festive and noisy day, and a highly visible day for the robed and pointy-hooded folks who called themselves the Invisible Empire.

They arrived by train and wagon and automobile from dozens of outlying small towns, and from across Texas and the South and the Midwest. They marched in the downtown streets and crowded the old state fairgrounds.

Thousands of spectators cheered and applauded them. The Klan was being honored in a city friendly to its white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-labor union doctrines, which the hooded brotherhood preached under the rubrics of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, patriotism, stern morality, prohibition and "native-born American" racial purity.

On the evening of Oct. 24, the day after Ku Klux Klan Day, 5,631 new members took the oath of allegiance to the KKK at an initiation ceremony at the fairgrounds, accompanied by Dallas Klan No. 66's 75-member drum and bugle corps. Eight hundred women joined the Klan auxiliary.

Dallas was a prosperous city of about 160,000 residents then. It considered itself a sophisticated town, but it wasn't. Many of its residents had only recently arrived from cotton farms and rural villages, and most brought a lack of book learning and their grievances and prejudices with them.

Of those 160,000 residents, more than 13,000 belonged to the Klan, the highest per capita of any city in the country. Dallas journalist and historian Darwin Payne, who has written extensively about the KKK in Dallas, has estimated that "after discounting ineligible groups such as women, children and minorities, the membership presumably represented about one out of three eligible men in Dallas."

Nationwide, between 4 million and 5 million belonged to the Klan. Dallas Klan No. 66, according to the KKK itself, was the nation's largest chapter.

Over the last few elections, candidates backed by the Kluxers had won control of City Hall and the county courthouse. The city police commissioner and the county sheriff were Klansmen.

So were many of the law officers they commanded. So were many of the city's working men, businessmen - including Chamber of Commerce members - lawyers and judges, dentists and doctors, and several journalists. The pastors of some of the larger, influential Protestant churches praised the Kluxers from their pulpits.

The Klan's principal adversary in the city was The Dallas Morning News. Years later, the newspaper's publisher, George Bannerman Dealey, called its stand against the Klan "perhaps the most courageous thing The News ever did."

The smaller Dallas Journal, founded and run by The News, and the independent Dallas Dispatch joined The News in the fight. The publisher of the largest evening paper, The Dallas Times Herald, instructed its staff to "go down the middle" in its Klan coverage and commentary "because many solid citizens are members."

Dallas Klan No. 66 was established in 1920, about six years after the rebirth of the KKK in Tennessee. The original Klan, founded by Confederate veterans in 1865 to terrorize and intimidate freed slaves and re-establish white supremacy in the South, was disbanded in 1869.

But in 1915, D.W. Griffith's wildly popular movie, The Birth of a Nation, romanticized and mythologized the old Klan as defenders of white female virtue and became a huge factor in making the new Klan popular.

In spring 1921, the KKK publicly announced its presence in Dallas. Klansmen invited a Times Herald reporter to accompany them while they abducted a black Adolphus hotel elevator operator from his home and drove him to an isolated place in the country. There, they whipped him and burned the initials KKK into his forehead with acid.

Then they drove him back to the city and forced him to walk, half-naked and bleeding, into the Adolphus lobby of the Adolphus. A detailed account appeared on the Times Herald front page on April 2. Both Dallas County Sheriff Dan Harston and the Dallas Police Department refused to investigate.

"The Negro was guilty of doing something which he had no right to do," the sheriff said. The elevator operator's supposed crime was "consorting with a white woman."

Two of the city's state district judges publicly expressed approval of the Klan's action.

Six weeks later, on a Saturday night, the downtown streetlights were dimmed and nearly 800 robed Klansmen paraded single file along Main and Elm streets carrying American flags, flaming crosses and signs reading "All Pure White," "Degenerates Go," " The Invisible Empire," "We Stand for White Supremacy," or containing slurs against blacks, Jews and Catholics.

The next day, Alonzo Wasson, editor of The News editorial page, went to his office to read the proofs of the upcoming Monday paper. He also wrote a blistering editorial attacking the Klan and its brutality, and placed it under the headline: "Dallas Slandered."

If the freedom of Dallas residents was endangered as the Klan claimed, Wasson wrote, "it is by the redivivus of mob spirit in the disguising garb of the Ku Klux Klan." He called the Klansmen "exemplars of lawlessness" and urged a grand jury investigation into their activities.

Dealey, The News' publisher, knew nothing of the editorial until he read it in his morning paper. He visited Wasson in his office and complimented him on the editorial. He also reprimanded him: "I believe it would be better to hold a conference when breaking new ground of editorial policy is contemplated."

Nonetheless, Wasson's attack on the Kluxers was adopted as The News' editorial stance. The newspaper was at war against the Invisible Empire.

During months to come, Klansmen kidnapped more people and took them to the Trinity River bottoms. They whipped some, tarred and feathered others, and ordered several to leave town. The Klan a few years later boasted that it had committed such acts more than 60 times, in the name of morality.

News reporters investigated the incidents and wrote stories. The paper's editorials inveighed against the Klan and the public officials who condoned and praised its activities. The newspaper ran wire stories about Klan violence in other parts of the country. It helped organize an anti-Klan mass meeting that 5,000 men attended. It reprinted a 21-part series exposing the crimes of the Klan that had appeared in the New York World.

But the Klan grew in popularity and membership. It took over Dallas' City Hall and county courthouse. Statewide, the Klan candidate was elected to the U.S. Senate.

In the midst of this war, the Kluxers called on subscribers and advertisers to boycott The News, declaring that the paper was owned and operated by Catholics. (It wasn't.)

Circulation plummeted. So many businesses dropped their advertising - some supporting the Klan, others fearing it - that the newspaper was in dire financial straits. The Klan bragged that The News soon would be bankrupt. And had it not sold its parent newspaper, The Galveston News, it might have collapsed.

The sale was concluded in March 1923, about six months before Ku Klux Klan Day at the State Fair of Texas.

In 1924, it appeared that Judge Felix Robertson of Dallas, openly the Klan candidate, might win the nomination for governor in the Democratic primary - the only election in Texas that mattered in those days. The News opposed him.

In the runoff election, he carried Dallas County by a 2-1 margin. But Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, the anti-Klan candidate backed by The News, beat him statewide and became Texas' first female governor.

Within two years, Dallas Klan No. 66 shrank from 13,000 members to 1,300 and declined until it closed its headquarters in 1929.

A Klan endorsement had become poison in Texas politics. Ku Klux Klan Day at the fair had turned out to be its last big hoorah.

Bryan Woolley, a journalist for more than 40 years, has published four novels. His next book, The Wonderful Room, a memoir of his first newspaper job on the Mexican border in the 1950s, will be published in September.

To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.